Pulse Assistant was a chat drawer beside the monitoring UI. Operators who
want to talk to their infrastructure already use Claude Code, Codex, or
another MCP client, and Pulse MCP gives those agents the same governed
tools. Keeping a second, weaker chat in the web app cost a 66 kB chunk,
a launcher on every page, hand-off buttons on alerts, findings, approvals
and drawers, and thousands of lines of OpenCode-parity drawer code, for a
feature the maintainer judged ineffective.
This removes the browser chat and everything that only fed it:
- The drawer, its launcher (desktop and phone), the command-palette
Assistant commands, the Escape and blocking-dialog shell plumbing, and
the chat store, client, dev stream fixture and generated SSE types.
- Every "Open in Assistant", "Explain with Assistant", "Discuss" and
"Ask Assistant" hand-off on alerts, incident timelines, Patrol findings,
approvals, run history, the attention workbench and resource drawers,
with their context models and the chat-only helpers they used.
- The Assistant settings page and its session maintenance section. The
page becomes "External agents" at /settings/pulse-intelligence/agents;
the old /assistant path, ?tab=assistant and system-ai-assistant redirect
there with the hash kept.
Alert Investigate now starts a targeted Patrol run (resource, alert ID and
type) and says where the findings land, and it ignores repeat clicks while
the request is in flight. The run route needs an admin with ai:execute, so
security status gains settingsCapabilities.patrolRun, derived from the same
snapshot as the other admin capabilities but following the route for
org-scoped admins, organization-bound tokens and a cookie beside a token,
and Investigate is offered only where it is true. The Patrol
tool transcript block moves to components/patrol. A small aiAvailability
store holds the session assistantEnabled fact that gates Patrol entry
points and Investigate; it now clears and refreshes on organization switch,
refreshes when organization loading settles on another org and after
provider removal, and ignores answers that arrive after a newer one.
The backend chat service stays: Patrol investigations run on it and
Pulse Mobile chat uses it until 31 March 2027, so /api/ai/chat, the
session endpoints and the stream contract are unchanged. A new contract
snapshot pins the steer_applied event that only the deleted TypeScript
projection used to cover.
highlight.js, used only by the chat's code highlighter, leaves the
dependencies, as does the DOMPurify carve-out that kept its fence hints.
Contracts, registry and readiness proofs drop the retired surfaces; the
ai-runtime contract loses about 1,600 lines of drawer rules while keeping
every backend session, stream and provider rule. The production build
ships about 100 kB less gzipped JavaScript.
A follow-up sent during an active run now offers itself to the running
agentic loop via POST /api/ai/sessions/{id}/steer. Accepted steers join
the loop at its next turn boundary (the abort-check site) as plain user
messages, are announced with a steer_applied stream event so the drawer
settles the pending row, and persist through the end-of-run save. A
steer carries prompt text only: no route, control-level, or autonomy
changes, no turn-budget extension, system sessions rejected, and the
per-session inbox is bounded (steer_backlog overflow). Delivery is not
guaranteed by acceptance: a run that ends first discards the inbox and
the row drains as an ordinary queued turn, so pre-steering queue
semantics remain the fallback. Steering rows lose edit/remove once
accepted.
Manifest-backed MCP tools, prompts, and resources with surface affordance contracts; agent capability manifest and governance projection; API contract tests and capability route projection; operations-loop and intelligence-funnel telemetry; release-control subsystem documentation, registry, and tooling; licensing and configuration.
Preserve workflow activity rows across active stream content and tool boundaries, and type the generated chat SSE route metadata that drives model activity rows.
Persist approval requests as governed planned actions with context confidence and stream that plan into Pulse Assistant approvals.
Reuse the planned action identity when approved actions execute so the unified audit trail stays continuous.
rcourtman